You should read the testing procedure again. Step#6:Select "Nero Digital Audio (HE-AAC v.2)....The person has set Nero to use HE-AAC v.2 as described in the frontend. If the result is LC-AAC, then it would rather look to a bug than a feature.

I read the testing procedure and it says that person also went on to the detailed encoder settings and changed them. As I already said, using the defaults, or using a preset, all would have produced a good result.

In other words, your frontend is working correctly without bug when it suddenly goes from HE profile to LC one just because the user manually set the bitrate to 64 kbps after selecting the HE profile.It's something I don't understand, but you're probably right.BTW, I can't reproduce either the bug you're mentionning.

Fact remains: MS gave them an encoder, told them exactly how to use it, and they didn't apply the same carefullness for the competitor. Is that a fair test?

No. But did Nero pay anything for this test? . This is pure business/marketing after all.I'm not questioning these results, they might be perfectly valid. It's just that tests like these annoy me quite a bit, because IF the results were in competitors favour the results would never been published.How many similar tests have been conducted where the results weren't 'good enough' and thus everything was just shelved? it's impossible to know.

Since the chance of a recent Nero encoder having been used seem 0 (test was conducted in October, we released new one in November), it doesn't really matter to me.

Good point indeed. The older (< Nero 7) HE-AAC encoder is clearly worse than the one bundled with Nero 7 (and also worse than Coding Technology implementation - see here).

But there's something which leads me to believe that HE-AAC was used and not LC-AAC: it's the results of si02.wav (= castanets). It's the only sample which revealed a huge difference between AAC and WMAPro (correct me if I didn't understand the graphs). To explain so big difference, either the AAC encoder performed really poorly or the WMAPro encoding was as sharp as a razor blade. The second is unlikely (WMAPro doesn't handle very well pre-echo). But if HE-AAC was really used, then the results would be coherent: SBR encodings have currently really poor performance for pre-echo. Consequently, even with weak performance WMAPro should appear as clearly better than HE-AAC, but not LC-AAC (with a modern implementation like Nero) with a sample like castanets/si02.From this and according to my own experience, I'd say that HE-AAC was used. But for all other samples, results are surprising me. From my experience HE-AAC is usually better than WMApro. But if the test include the same family of HE-AAC encoder I've tested this summer (HE-AAC at 80 kbps was as poorer as LC-AAC from iTunes and not that far from standard WMA) then the tests results could be in coherence with my experience.

From this and according to my own experience, I'd say that HE-AAC was used. But for all other samples, results are surprising me. From my experience HE-AAC is usually better than WMApro. But if the test include the same family of HE-AAC encoder I've tested this summer (HE-AAC at 80 kbps was as poorer as LC-AAC from iTunes and not that far from standard WMA) then the tests results could be in coherence with my experience.

Hey! They used WMA 10 Pro+, not WMA 9.1 Pro. The version 10, let alone +, isn't eyet available publically.

From this and according to my own experience, I'd say that HE-AAC was used. But for all other samples, results are surprising me. From my experience HE-AAC is usually better than WMApro. But if the test include the same family of HE-AAC encoder I've tested this summer (HE-AAC at 80 kbps was as poorer as LC-AAC from iTunes and not that far from standard WMA) then the tests results could be in coherence with my experience.

Hey! They used WMA 10 Pro+, not WMA 9.1 Pro. The version 10, let alone +, isn't eyet available publically.

Assuming that WMA10+ correspond to a new encoder and not WMP 10, that's right. But is Microsoft able to transform an encoder which doesn't perform really good in sharpness even at 192 kbps to something excellent at 64 kbps? I don't think so. I've never seen before such metamorphosis.

For sure, October Nero7 release contained 2-years old AAC encoder, which was replaced somewhere in November with the improved SBR encoder.

Concerning HE-AAC v2 (HE-AAC + Parametric Stereo) - it was also introduced in November, and for sure there is no way to activate it in the GUI at 64 kbps - as it was not even designed for such bit rate.